Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form

Abstract

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible “worlds” containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary text. In this paper, I shall discuss the emergence of three related aesthetic worlds: first, Rimbaud’s Illuminations provides the “mythic” occasion for the eruption of post-Symbolist literature; second, Williams’ Spring and All develops Rimbaud’s poetics in terms of twentieth-century modernism; finally, the conception of Baroque form as explored in recent aesthetics unites Rimbaud and Williams in the shared task of overcoming Cartesian dualism.